Eric Arnesen, a specialist in the history of race, labor, politics and civil rights was officially installed yesterday the George Washington University’s James R. Hoffa Teamsters Professor in Modern American Labor History.

The George Washington University Board of Trustees voted to continue to contain the cost of attendance, guaranteeing no tuition increase for returning undergraduate students and limiting the increase in the overall cost of attendance for incoming undergraduate students to no more than 3.5 percent.

President Barack Obama will deliver his State of the Union address to a unified Republican Congress on Jan. 20. Experts from the George Washington University are available to comment on President Obama’s proposals and their policy and political implications.

A team of researchers studying plants has assembled the largest dated evolutionary tree, using it to show the order in which flowering plants evolved specific strategies, such as the seasonal shedding of leaves, to move into areas with cold winters. The results are published today in the journal Nature.

The ancestor of snakes and lizards likely gave birth to live young, rather than laid eggs, and over time species have switched back and forth in their preferred reproductive mode, according to research published in print in Ecology Letters Dec. 17.

Researchers, using quantitative methods focused on the shape of dental fossils, find that none of the usual suspects fits the expected profile of an ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans. They also present evidence that the lines that led to Neanderthals and modern humans diverged nearly 1 million years ago, much earlier than studies based on molecular evidence have suggested.

Comprehensive immigration reform that includes a clear path to citizenship could drastically reduce violence against women and girls in the United States and across the world, according to a new policy brief released today by the George Washington University Global Women’s Institute and We Belong Together.

The George Washington University Global Women’s Institute (GWI) is the educational partner of the Malala Fund, a nonprofit, named for Malala Yousafzai, working to ensure that girls around the world have access to education. GWI-affiliated faculty will work with the publisher Little, Brown and Company to develop curriculum tools to accompany Malala’s recently released memoir, “I Am Malala.”

A George Washington University researcher will receive $1.3 million over the next five years from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) for research that will help better understand how type 2 diabetes develops, possibly informing the development of novel treatments to reverse the disease.